Journey to the Promised Land

It's been a week - a wonderful, hellish, emotional, exhausting week filled with moments of great hope and inspiration as well as times of deep despair. I keep wondering when and if I will ever feel 'normal' again and then find myself wondering what that really means. This experience has changed me profoundly, deeply and I don't think the old me will ever really return. So I am trying to move forward in search of a new sense of self.

My youngest son asked me to watch a movie with him the other day. It was the story of Nephi building the ship and crossing the sea to the promised land. As I sat and watched it with him, finding comfort in his little body on my lap, I felt so much like Nephi. I saw the journey ahead of me as a vast ocean to cross with the promise of a much better land once I get there. I saw myself standing on the shore needing to build a ship to get across it and needing to build it from scratch. Nephi had never taken a ship building class. He didn't have skilled ship builders with him on the shore. He didn't even have blueprints or plans to help him know how to build it. He only had himself, his faith and the Lord. Just like me.

This journey is so intensely personal, which is part of what has been so incredibly excrutiating. It's been so hard not to keep imagining all the other tragedies which now seem to me would be so easy to bear. I have legions of friends, family members & church members who would be at my doorstep to help if I were only at the liberty to ask. I've struggled dealing with my anger that the very sin that has pushed me into the darkness is also the one that is isolating me from the support and help that I desperately need. There is such irony that in an effort to somehow preserve my husband's trust, I can't tell anyone. It seems incredibly unfair and completely undeserved since he has violated my trust over and over and over for our entire marriage. It smacks of injustice that the only way to rebuild the trust that has been decimated is to preserve the shards of it that are left right now. I pray for the mercy to overcome the justice...or injustice.

The Lord has showered me with tender mercies. He has led me to books, movies, talks & music that have taught me and given me strength and insight. I picked up "The Purpose Driven Life" by Rick Warren at the library last week. In reading just a couple of the chapters, particularly the one on the purpose of adversity, I came to some sense of understanding of the isolation and the purificiation that can and will come from this time. He said, "You'll never know that God is all you need until God is all you have." I have felt that so intensely. In a moment of deepest despair in expressing my loneliness, my Stake President counseled that this experience would give me a unique opportunity to partner with the Lord. Just like Nephi. He had to pray to find the ore, for the knowledge to build the bellows to melt the ore to form into the tools before he could even begin to build the ship. I can't look at the ocean - I can't focus on the overwhelming journey that most certainly lies ahead for me. I can only pray for the ore.

Another quote from the book said, "Your focus determines your feelings." I have felt so powerless so many times in the past several weeks. I have always been somewhat of a control freak and the Lord has been trying to teach me otherwise for years, but this experience has eradicated that. I don't know from one minute or hour to the next how I will be feeling. I don't know if tomorrow I will finally be able to handle something as simple as going grocery shopping. This lack of control has contributed so much to my despairing - wondering how to survive when I'm at the mercy of my unanticipated roller coaster of emotions. But this thought - that my focus could not just affect but DETERMINE my feelings gave me a thread of power back. I cannot change the past. I cannot change the circumstances. I cannot change my husband's addiction, but I can change my focus.

I had a teacher once tell me the two most powerful words in the English language are, "What if?" In the past few weeks as my mind has raced through all the scenarios in the past, asking myself all the inevitable what ifs, it has spiraled me further and further into anger and despair. How could I not have known? How could he have taken me to the temple? How could he have accepted callings? How could his priesthood leaders or his parents not have known? Why didn't the spirit tell me sooner? Why? What? How? When? Lower and deeper and darker. But what if? What if this is the best thing that could happen to our marriage? What if he truly is sincere in his repentance? What if his letting go of this dark secret, truly healing and repenting makes him a better husband and father? What if this experience could refine me, change me permanently for the better and make me more like the Savior? My focus determines my feelings. My focus determines my feelings.

There is only One who knows the tools I will need to cross this ocean. I must remember the hope of the promised land, but focus only on the task at hand. I must ask in faith to find the ore, knowing He will teach me step by step how to build the massive ship to cross the water. I must return again and again to His house so He can teach and tutor me. He is the great Creator. He is the great Instructor. He is the great Healer. He is the great Ship Builder.